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Under my belt, which I would 2nd the recommendation for: Marx, The Communist Manifesto Zinn, A People's History of the United States Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, On Nationalism Upton Sinclair, The Jungle Vincent Bevins, The Jarkarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk Smedly Butler, War is a Racket Mark Twain, To the Person Sitting in Darkness Sheldon Whitehouse: Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy On deck: Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent Chris Hedges: any recommendations for one of his books above the others? Jack London, The People of the Abyss, War of the Classes David Dayen, Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power Also, in the 'literary lefty' category, I second the recommendation for Steinbeck. And you have to read Melville's Moby Dick and Bartleby the Scrivener. Theodore Dreiser too is good.
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Sep 13, 2020 18:49
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poisonpill posted:I’d prefer not to 
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Sep 14, 2020 01:26
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Malkina_ posted:With Chris Hedges, do American Fascists: The Christian Right and the war on America. It details the Dominion and right-wing Christian movements since WWII and the Civil Rights movement, and how they completely consolidated control over the Republican and even the Democratic parties. Thanks for the recommendation, excellent.
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Sep 17, 2020 22:32
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cda posted:Sausage party I should have also included: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of the Great American Cities (1961). Absolutely brilliant book. Gets into not just cities, but the whole power structure of society, and she saw the growing corporate influence wiggling its way in. I first read it well over 10 years ago but I still remember parts of it very strongly and it is still deeply relevant. I see Jane Jacobs has written several more books. Has anybody here read any of them? "Dark Age Ahead" and "Systems of Survival" sound interesting... but like Chris Hedge's stuff... I don't want to get too horribly depressed.
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Sep 18, 2020 00:12
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team overhead smash posted:I think often people get tripped up on semantics and just make argument up based on how they think Marx defined value rather than how he actually did. Agreed. Just finished Manufacturing Consent. Should be required reading for all US high schoolers. Some of the case studies get a little in-depth and repetitive. I read the whole thing but I don't think anybody would suffer if they just read the intro to each chapter and summary/conclusions to each chapter. An abridged edition for high schoolers would be useful, perhaps. And the problems he writes about I think have only gotten worse.
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Nov 11, 2020 02:56
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TrixRabbi posted:Every high schooler should be made to watch They Live accompanied by excerpts from Manufacturing Consent. Eh, I don't know about They Live. I watched it an enjoyed it but it is a little too 'lizard people'-esque conspiracy theory. There are better leftist movies out there.
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Nov 14, 2020 02:51
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I'm getting through MLK's "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community". Very strong recommend.
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Dec 5, 2020 17:08
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Finished "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community". Yep. We shot the reincarnation of Jesus. Humanity is doomed. Should be mandatory reading for junior high schoolers. What an optimistic visionary.
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Dec 22, 2020 02:00
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The North Tower posted:Added to my reading list. MLK is a lot more accessible than Derrida, I hope you enjoy King. A cliff notes style podcast for philosophy I'd recommend is "Philosophize This!". He has an episode or two on Derrida that is probably a lot more accessible than wading through his book. Blastedhellscape posted:if you want to learn about how capitalist hegemony failed us all during the 20th century. Legacy of Ashes is all about the history of the CIA, and Enemies is all about America's weird experiment with having a secret police force (the FBI) that never really worked out. Sounds pretty leftist to me! Never really worked out? The FBI worked out and continues to work out pretty great for enforcing state power.
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Feb 15, 2021 23:48
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Finished Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. While not a leftist socialist or communist, Sagan has written a quite good liberal commentary on science and its role in society. Came out in 1996 and boy howdy does he get vindicated by events up to now in 2020. Onward to Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth.
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Mar 1, 2021 23:30
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The North Tower posted:King Leopold’s Ghost isn’t lefty per se, but since it’s about imperialism On that note, I just finished Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. Strong recommend. The psychological profiles giving specific details on how colonial war destroys people - both the colonized and the colonial - are heartbreaking. US escapades in the Middle East over the last 30 years have undoubtedly provided multiple additional similar chapters on either side, especially when dealing with torture and our veteran suicide rate. A new updated Wretched of the Earth is yet to be written. gfarrell80 fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Apr 26, 2021 |
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Apr 25, 2021 02:25
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Beefeater1980 posted:Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management I haven't read it yet, but in my orbit I got a recommendation for what sounds like possibly a similar work that could be used as a companion read: The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, by Gerald Horne.
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May 29, 2021 15:55
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Finishing up Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Pretty relevant critique even one hundred years later, given the power of our financial sector today.
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Jul 20, 2021 03:23
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neongrey posted:Does anyone have good recs on specifically leftist stories? The Gadfly The Jungle
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Jul 28, 2021 03:40
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DurianGray posted:Yeah, I can think of about a dozen leftist fiction authors off the top of my head (they're also all trans and/or non-binary) but a lot of them don't write stuff that's super political/theory based necessarily (unless you count having queer characters as your protagonists as being political?). Moby Dick baby is one of the best subversive works of the 19th century, doing work in group psychology, critiquing capitalism, and predicting our ultimate demise because we willingly submit to authoritarian figures: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/we-are-all-aboard-the-pequod/ Also, my favorite bit, 'The Monkey Rope': Herman Melville posted:It was mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the whale’s back, the blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the monster’s back ... in very many cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the whole tensing or stripping operation is concluded. The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him... And Dostoyevsky, while not a traditional 'leftist', certainly has his moments: F Dusty Brothers Karamazov posted:Until you really make yourself the brother to all, brotherhood will not arrive. Never, prompted by science or self-interest alone, will human beings be able to share their property and their privileges in harmless fashion. None will consider that he has enough, and all will grumble, envying and destroying one another. You ask when what I describe will come true. It will come true, but first there must be a period of human solitariness.’ What kind of solitariness do you mean? I asked him. ‘The kind that reigns everywhere now, particularly in our own time, though it has not yet established itself universally, and its hour has not yet come. For each now strives to isolate his person as much as possible from the others, wishing to experience within himself life’s completeness, yet from all his efforts there results not life’s completeness but a complete suicide, for instead of discovering the true nature of their being they lapse into total solitariness. For in our era all are isolated into individuals, each retires solitary within his burrow, each withdraws from the other, conceals himself and that which he possesses, and ends by being rejected of men and by rejecting them. He amasses wealth in solitariness, thinking: how strong I am now and how secure, yet he does not know, the witless one, that the more he amasses, the further he will sink into suicidal impotence. For he has become accustomed to relying upon himself alone and has isolated himself from the whole as an individual, has trained his soul not to trust in help from others, in human beings and mankind, and is fearful only of losing his money and the privileges he has acquired. In every place today the human mind is mockingly starting to lose its awareness of the fact that a person’s true security consists not in his own personal, solitary effort, but in the common integrity of human kind.
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Aug 1, 2021 05:02
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Xander77 posted:Orson Scott Card's "we're all the same tribe, we all have the same rules, by which I mean human rules" speech in Xenocide, if you will. Care to copy and paste that, or point in direction of it? <edit> Also, 3/4 of the way through now I can recommend Jane Jacob's Dark Age Ahead. She is not strictly a leftist, more of a capital L liberal and social critic/commentator. Writing in 2004, Jacobs clearly predicts the 2008 housing crash, for instance. The book I think makes a decent companion read to Sagan's The Demon Haunted World. Sagan coming from the world of science, Jacobs form the world of urban design. A couple takes are clunky, but in general Jacobs nails things. As an architect I've always admired Jacobs since The Death and Life of the Great American Cities. gfarrell80 fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Aug 3, 2021 |
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Aug 3, 2021 00:49
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roomtone posted:...why communism has gone so badly in its various incarnations thus far - Any deep discussion on this is really outside the scope of this thread. But for a starter I'd recommend Manufacturing Consent, The Jakarta Method, and Blowback Podcast Season 2. There's a lot of reasons, but mostly if you get in to the knitty and gritty most Communist states are immediately the active targets of pretty intense foreign intervention. The Russian and Chinese revolutions, for instance, both had substantial amounts of foreign troops coming in to intervene and try to kill the Communist baby in the cradle (not to mention Vietnam, Cuba and many leftist movements in South America and SE Asia). And if you look at many metrics, there are apologists who will say that communist states actually did pretty darn good, considering the uphill sledding they were going against (and that most of them are not true communist states anyways). Russkies beat the Nazis, put a man in space, all from a backwards Tsarist peasant society. Cubans do pretty good on medicine, literacy and infant mortality. Chinese depending on how you look at it may be pretty much eating our lunch now, again from a state that only 3-4 generations ago was a 'backward' horribly exploited colonial victim. More leftist lit I finished this summer: Eugene Deb's writings are also a strong recommend: Writings of Eugene V Debs: A Collection of Essays by America's Most Famous Socialist
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Aug 4, 2021 03:53
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Phew, finished a real honker of a tome: Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Plunged in to it only because Chris Hedges noted it in one of his lectures. Tops out at 585 pages. John Ralston Saul nails quite a lot of important observations absolutely, but also goes wildly off the rails with several of his arguments. An abridged version of just the good stuff would probably knock this down to under 300 pages and be a very powerful concise book. Replace Dictatorship of Reason with Dictatorship of Capitalism and it would be more on the mark.
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Nov 6, 2021 21:57
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C. Wright Mills: 'The Power Elite', 1954. Awesome book. In my world it would be required reading for US high schoolers.
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Dec 7, 2021 01:36
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Prole posted:Alex Nunn's book about the Corbyn Leadership with emphasis on the wreckers from Labour HQ and their shithousery promises to be a good read for any UK-centric politics-heads. Especially if the Forde Report drops unredacted (surely someone will leak it?) soon as suspected. Wonder if there is book about the shenanigans pulled on the Bernie 16 and 20 campaigns. I wouldn't want to read it, but would be good to have as a historical record. Another few leftist lit: Anything by Frederick Douglass. I read his first biography about his enslavement and escape. He shows a great psychological understanding of the tools used by oppressors to keep the oppressed compliant. Many of which you'll recognize as used by the capitalist to control wage slaves. It is a beautiful book, shows how compassionate individuals who show kindness to slaves quickly have the habit beaten out of them. Also the story of how he learned to read is amazing and hugely class and indoctrination loaded. Also: Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine. David Harvey: A Brief History of Neoliberalism.
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Jan 25, 2022 03:36
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A couple excellent recent reads: Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, Timothy Mitchell (2011) White Collar: The American Middle Classes, C. Wright Mills (1951)
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Aug 8, 2022 18:49
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Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated <- woof, a real eye opener. Also I did finish Gerald Horne's The Counter-Revolution of 1776 and can recommend it. Horne has a very academic prose style and the book becomes somewhat repetitive on its main points, but guaranteed to blow your mind a bit if you're married to the traditional history of the founding. Excellent use of primary source writings.
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Dec 15, 2022 04:05
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Parenti is awesome. Currently on "Inventing Reality: Politics of News Media" Other good stuff: The State, 1918, Randolph Bourne Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies, 2010, Judith Stein Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, 1989, Barbara Ehrenreich. The Professional Managerial Class, 1977, John and Barbara Ehrenreich edit, also: William Morris: "Useful Work versus Useless Toil", "The Hopes of Civilization", and "How I Became a Socialist" Rosa Luxemburg, "Socialism or Barbarism: The Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg" Suggested essays: "Reform or Revolution" "The National Question" "Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle" "The Crisis of German Social Democracy" "Stagnation and Progress of Marxism" "The Accumulation of Capital - an Anti-Critique" "Order Prevails in Berlin" gfarrell80 fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Oct 18, 2023 |
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Oct 14, 2023 02:25
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Paul Robeson, "Here I Stand" 1958. Most popular black entertainer of his day. Lifelong working class supporter. Victim of McCarthyism. Breathtakingly awesome dude. A Paul Robeson figure is something our generation completely lacks. Black Bourgeoisie, 1970; Edward Franklin Frazier. C. Wright Mills, "The Marxists", 1962 gfarrell80 fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Feb 4, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 23:03
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